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Damning testimony

A woman found covered in blood on the driveway of her Loyalist Parkway-area home, in the wee hours of Aug. 31, 2014, told her rescuers her common-law ex-boyfriend was her attacker, a judge overseeing the attempted murder trial of Shawn Birt heard Wednesday.

Birt looked on from the courtroom as paramedic, Antonia McFadden, testified how medics found the then 49-year-old female complainant with cuts all over her body. The plaintiff has already testified about the sequence of events that led to her injuries.

On arriving at the home McFadden said was near the lake in Trenton, McFadden noticed the “silhouette of an officer with his gun drawn in the door.

“Two people (civilians) approached us and said, ‘hurry up she’s dying.’

McFadden and her partner, who went to the scene, met officers on the driveway where the woman was laying in on the driveway.

“She was talking to us,” McFadden said. “She was covered in blood. He one ankle was severely lacerated. She had cuts all over her body.”

The woman remained conscious on her way to Trenton Memorial Hospital and told medics she had crawled her way out of the house. She expressed concern about the safety of her children (who were not at the residence) and dogs.

“She was worried he might come back and hurt her,” McFadden recalls.

Once inside the ambulance, McFadden discovered trauma to her left knee.

“She was still talking to us the whole time,” McFadden said of the injured though coherent female. “She had mentioned that it was her ex-boyfriend or common-law that had done this to her.”

McFadden testified, “it was him who had called 911. That was the information we got.”

An officer testified to finding a hand-written note on top of the stove with the author addressing the children by saying “he loved them and sorry.”

Superior Court Justice John Johnston also heard from Paul Filjeski was on a fishing trip when he found Birt wading into water near Indian Island in the middle of the Bay of Quinte.

“At first I thought his canoe could have drifted away,” Filjeski said of the story he was given from a shirtless and shoeless Birt. “When he got into the boat, I started noticing things, like the wounds on each wrist, the blood on his face. He wouldn’t look directly at me.

“He said he fell on the rocks, getting onto the island,” Filjeski said.

A suspicious Filjeski took pictures of a shirtless Birt on the trip across the bay to the Frazer Park Marina near Highway 2. He timed the bizarre meeting at around 11:30 a.m.

“I was asking questions,” Filjeski said. “There wasn’t a lot of conversation. He had a tattoo on his back that said Birt.”

Filjeski called the Ontario Provincial Police after Birt departed the boat and disappeared from view in downtown Trenton.

Crown attorney Jason Nicol played a recording of Filjeski’s call to the police.

You can hear Filjeski saying, “I just picked up some guy who was standing on the Indian Island off of Dufferin Street in Trenton. He waded out into the water asking for a ride, saying his canoe had gotten away from him.

“He kept asking me to drop him off at Trenton Cold Storage,” he said of the stranger.

He’s got blood smears all over his face,” Filjeski tells the officer. “He had a really bad cut across his left wrist. A big scratch across his arm.

He got out the boat and wandered off,” Filjeski added.

“I think this may be somebody that we’re looking for,” the female voice taking Filjeski’s call is heard saying.

Filjeski made notice of police units being mobilized in the manhunt for Birt.

“I saw about five squad cars go by,” he’s heard saying.

Birt was 45 at the time he was charged by Quinte West OPP, after police claimed a man assaulted a 49-year-old woman at a home on Loyalist Parkway in Carrying Place, on Aug. 31, 2014.

The woman was treated in hospital for serious injuries. The trial continues Thursday.